FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 149, John Hospers Part E, this post includes portion of 6-2-94 letter from Hospers to me blasting Christian Evangelicalism, (Featured artist is Judy Chicago )

I sent a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers on Evolution to John Hospers in May of 1994 which was the 10th anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s passing and I promptly received a typed two page response from Dr. John Hospers. Dr. Hospers had both read my letter and all the inserts plus listened to the whole sermon and had some very angry responses. If you would like to hear the sermon from Adrian Rogers and read the transcript then refer to my earlier post at this link. Over the last few weeks I have posted portions of Dr. Hospers’ letter and portions of the cassette tape that he listened to back in 1994, but today I want to post a review that Hospers did of Sam Harris’ book THE END OF FAITH and then below give my reaction to it. I also read that book and found it very engaging although I differed with many of the assertions made by Harris.

I devote the opening section of this essay to a brief summary of Sam Harris’ (2004) book The End of Faith, with some deletions and a few additions of my own.

When I say to you, a trusted friend, “I have faith in you,” I am relying on past experience of your character and disposition to make a statement about my present attitude toward you. Many professions of faith, however, are not of this kind: they express a present attitude which has little or no basis in fact.

When we read, for example, that water has been turned into wine, or that a person already dead has come back to life, we have no such basis in our past experience; indeed, what is alleged is something contrary to our experience of how the world works; it is “pure faith´ in the absence of any evidence to sustain the belief. Many of the ancient Greeks believed that there were numerous gods—Zeus on Mt. Olympus ruling the earth, Poseidon ruling the seas, Pluto ruling the underworld, and do on. There were many forms of polytheism, as well as various forms of monotheism such as belief in the Old Testament god Yahweh. There is no empirical evidence that would enable us to determine which of them, if any, is true; belief in them is entirely a matter of faith. We have only the words in a supposedly sacred text. (We have independent evidence for the existence of Jesus, but not of Noah or Moses or Abraham.)

Not only have we no way to verify any of these beliefs, but there is an added problem: many of them contradict one another, so these beliefs cannot all be true. Zeus cannot be king of the gods if Zoroaster also is; nor can there be one and only one god if there are also numerous gods. If a belief is true, another belief that contradicts it cannot also be true. It is Aristotle’s Law of Non-contradiction that holds true, regardless of the field of discourse in which we are engaged.

Even within the same religious text, there are alleged truths that contradict one another. The god of the Old Testament is seen and heard: he talks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. But God, we are also told, is eternal and invisible. The infant Jesus was taken into Egypt, but (according to another Gospel) was not taken into Egypt. God is the author of all things, and thus also of evil, but he is, we are also told, not the author of evil; Satan is.

How can people believe these mutually contradictory statements? (1) Sometimes, I think, the belief rests on some ambiguity: it is true if you take it in one sense but not if you take it in another: Jesus was a man who was born in Bethlehem of Judea and died like the rest of us, but also he was God who existed “from all eternity” and “before the foundation of the world”. This certainly seems like a contradiction, but some theologians have attempted to work out ways in which it is not. (2) Most believers, however, fail to notice these discrepancies because they don’t really bother to read the passages in question.

They mouth the lines as part of a religious liturgy, but the repetition of the words has been almost automatic: they do not think them through or try to connect them with other passages with which they are at odds.

Nor do they try to relate them to their everyday experience, as they do when talking about themselves or what goes on in their familiar world. They believe, at least they do not doubt, that (perhaps in their own lifetime) Jesus will return to earth “on the clouds of heaven” to bring “the legions of the saved” into eternal paradise with him. Yet if they were actually to see a robed figure appearing to them out of the sky and swooping earthward, they would probably be as surprised as anyone else They do not doubt, either, that the resurrection of Jesus was genuine: they do not cite, as their preachers do, numerous religious authorities who proclaim to them that Jesus’ resurrection is just as certainly true as the existence of the church they are now in; they don’t think about these religious authorities, they just believe on faith that after death they will live again.

What is it that prompts people to entertain such beliefs and continue to hold them throughout a lifetime even in the face of contrary experience? Some say is hope, grounded in the promises of Scripture; others, that it is hope entertained in desperation; for others, it is to believe something you know darned well isn’t so. For most part, believes Harris, it is the psychological difficulty or inability to face reality, the fact that “this is it” and death ends our mortal existence. People find life unbearable without belief in a hereafter, particularly when life has not dealt kindly with them and they have nothing to live for in the here and now. The parents’ six-year-old daughter has just died of a fatal disease and they desperately want to see her again; what buoys them up is the faith that they will one day be with her again.

At this point I could wish that the author had been more explicit about what the content of their belief is supposed to be: the parents believe they will see their daughter again, be with her, and love her. But for how long will it be? Presumably forever? If the parents will not see her until they reach heaven in sixty years, will she still be the same small daughter at that time? That is how the grieving parents imagine it: they do not imagine her as a grown woman and certainly not as an old woman some years later (and certainly not as one who in the course of time dies). It’s ‘their little girl, now’—years later they might not feel so strongly about it any more. Also, would she still look the same as she did here—surely not as she did when ravaged by the disease? Would she still have those fits of coughing or sneezing as she used to, or that little limp, and the inability to digest certain foods? Or would she have no defects whatever, not even the peculiarities of personality which irritated some people and endeared her to others? Surely the parents would imagine her as having the characteristics they liked or approved of (not quite the same thing!). And would she coexist in heaven alongside a younger sister who had not yet been born when this one died? And what would their relations be with each other? Would warmth, familiarity, a bit of strangeness, and perhaps common faith be in such a relationship?

One could speculate forever about how such things should be imagined, or exactly what there would be to imagine. (Harris does not venture so far.) In any case, the grieving parents don’t try to imagine the future situation (happiness with their daughter in heaven) in any specific detail. It is enough that they see her again (For how long; forever? Might they not tire of it eventually)?

Never mind such details as to how such things are possible, or apparent obstacles like the Law of Non-contradiction, which they have never heard of anyway. Their primary wish is to be happy again, which they find impossible without her. It would seem that in such a situation one doesn’t adjust one’s feelings to the facts (don’t we all think we should?) but one adjusts the facts to one’s feelings—a recipe for psychological disaster from a Randian perspective.

2. Faith and morality

The above is a summary and critique of a world-view based on faith, which Harris presents in The End of Faith. The author, however, also delves somewhat summarily into moral philosophy, or at any rate into moral pronouncements. What apparently unites these pronouncements is the view, shared by most people at least in the West, that pain and suffering are evil and should be avoided unless such pain and suffering lead to greater happiness or fulfillment. He repeatedly condemns the Crusades and the Inquisition as the wanton infliction of suffering. Also condemned are a large number of Biblical commands and prohibitions: “What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:l6). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus 3l:l5). What is the punishment for cursing one’s father and mother? Death again (Exodus 2l:l7). What is the punishment for adultery? You’re catching on (Leviticus 20:l0).” (page 115)

Moreover, the details of such punishment are often spelled out, though modern believers have only a limited visualization of them. “If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or the souse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God (Deuteronomy l3:7-ll)” (page l8)

Most people today, however, do not read such passages, or even know that they exist. They are somewhat embarrassed if they have to come across them, but if they are committed to believing that the entire Bible is the Word of God, they dare not openly reject such passages—since they are apparently “stuck with them,” they simply ignore them or “pay them no heed.” But they cannot reject them outright if their eternal salvation depends on acceptance of the entire Bible.

The author does condemn torture and killing in all its forms (including capital punishment), including the Nazi, Soviet, and Chinese communist regimes. But the main target of his condemnation is none of these, but current Islamo-fascism as manifested especially in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Fundamentalist Muslims differ from their Soviet predecessors in at least one important respect: the Soviets were deterred by the fear of nuclear annihilation. Today’s Islamo-fascists not deterrable by threats of death: by killing unbelievers they are promised a blissful hereafter for themselves.

Pacifism, says Harris, is an unwillingness to die, combined with a willingness to let others die at the pleasure of the world’s thugs. Islamofascists exhibit, by contrast, a willingness to die, combined with a commitment to making every unbeliever die. Such is the ultimate result of accepting religious views based solely on faith.

Harris reserves the term “moderate Christians” for believers in Christianity who don’t take their faith very seriously. “Moderate Muslims”, however many of them there are, don’t take theirs seriously either. The fate of the world in the twenty-first century, he concludes, may hinge on how many moderate Muslims there will be in the coming years.

I must say that I find that conclusion extremely plausible.

_____________

Here is a portion of Hospers’ June 2, 1994 letter to me:

Most of the writers you quote are quoted out of context, so as to capture just the sentences you agree with. I hereby quote a passage from Bertrand Russell’s HUMAN SOCIETY IN ETHICS AND POLITICS, which I think is not out of context:

If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called “education”. This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defenselessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilized country.

My response to John Hospers and Sam Harris:

I personally like that quote from Bertrand Russell and see a lot of merit in it. Let me see if I can give a good argument based on evidence and not on faith alone.

In the above paper John Hospers makes this assertion:

When we read, for example, that water has been turned into wine, or that a person already dead has come back to life, we have no such basis in our past experience; indeed, what is alleged is something contrary to our experience of how the world works; it is “pure faith´ in the absence of any evidence to sustain the belief. Many of the ancient Greeks believed that there were numerous gods—Zeus on Mt. Olympus ruling the earth, Poseidon ruling the seas, Pluto ruling the underworld, and do on. There were many forms of polytheism, as well as various forms of monotheism such as belief in the Old Testament god Yahweh. There is no empirical evidence that would enable us to determine which of them, if any, is true; belief in them is entirely a matter of faith. We have only the words in a supposedly sacred text. (We have independent evidence for the existence of Jesus, but not of Noah or Moses or Abraham.)

Not only have we no way to verify any of these beliefs, but there is an added problem: many of them contradict one another, so these beliefs cannot all be true.

What you are describing is “blind faith” that is not based on any evidence at all and I do reject that as you do too!!!! I am glad we can agree on that. By the way did you know that you too have a sort of faith and that is in your faith in the view of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system!!!!

Many secularists have claimed that Christians do not even have the right to have a place at the table. However, the vast majority of great scientists of the last 500 years did hold the view that we live in an open system and they did not hold the view of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. Recently I read the article ANSWERING THE NEW ATHEISTS, by KerbyAnderson, Sunday, January 30 th, 2011, and that article notes:

Are science and Christianity at odds with one another? Certainly there have been times in the past when that has been the case. But to only focus on those conflicts is to miss the larger point that modern science grew out of a Christian world view. In a previous radio program based upon the book Origin Science by Dr. Norman Geisler and me, I explain Christianity’s contribution to the rise of modern science.{27}

Alister McGrath challenges this idea that science and religion are in conflict with one another. He says, “Once upon a time, back in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was certainly possible to believe that science and religion were permanently at war. . . . This is now seen as a hopelessly outmoded historical stereotype that scholarship has totally discredited.”{28}

….Do religious people have a blind faith? Certainly some religious people exercise blind faith. But is this true of all religions, including Christianity? Of course not. The enormous number of Christian books on topics ranging from apologetics to theology demonstrate that the Christian faith is based upon evidence.

But we might turn the question around on the New Atheists. You say that religious faith is not based upon evidence. What is your evidence for that broad, sweeping statement? Where is the evidence for your belief that faith is blind?

Orthodox Christianity has always emphasized that faith and reason go together. Biblical faith is based upon historical evidence. It is not belief in spite of the evidence, but it is belief because of the evidence.

The Bible, for example, says that Jesus appeared to the disciples and provided “many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).

Peter appealed to evidence and to eyewitnesses when he preached about Jesus as “a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22).

The Christian faith is not a blind faith. It is a faith based upon evidence. In fact, some authors contend that it takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe in God.{7}

Suppose we are climbing in the Alps and are very high on the bare rock, and suddenly the fog rolls in. The guide turns to us and says that the ice is forming and that there is no hope; before morning we will all freeze to death here on the shoulder of the mountain. Simply to keep warm the guide keeps us moving in the dense fog further out on the shoulder until none of us have any idea where we are. After an hour or so, someone says to the guide, “Suppose I dropped and hit a ledge ten feet down in the fog. What would happen then?” The guide would say that you might make it until the morning and thus live. So, with absolutely no knowledge or any reason to support his action, one of the group hangs and drops into the fog. This would be one kind of faith, a leap of faith.

Suppose, however, after we have worked out on the shoulder in the midst of the fog and the growing ice on the rock, we had stopped and we heard a voice which said, “You cannot see me, but I know exactly where you are from your voices. I am on another ridge. I have lived in these mountains, man and boy, for over sixty years and I know every foot of them. I assure you that ten feet below you there is a ledge. If you hang and drop, you can make it through the night and I will get you in the morning.

I would not hang and drop at once, but would ask questions to try to ascertain if the man knew what he was talking about and it he was not my enemy. In the Alps, for example, I would ask him his name. If the name he gave me was the name of a family from that part of the mountains, it would count a great deal to me. In the Swiss Alps there are certain family names that indicate mountain families of that area. In my desperate situation, even though time would be running out, I would ask him what to me would be the adequate and sufficient questions, and when I became convinced by his answers, then I would hang and drop.

__

Now I will turn to the message given by Adrian Rogers followed by some evidence from archaeology.

The historical, scientific, and prophetic accuracy of Scripture, along with its life-changing qualities, offer evidence that the Bible is the revealed Word of God.

Introduction

Scripture Passage: Revelation 22:18-19

It is absolutely imperative that you are certain of God’s Word. You will never get much of anything else settled until you are sure of the Bible. Your salvation depends on it, since the Bible says you are born again by “the Word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). Your sanctification depends upon it, because Jesus said, “Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy Word is truth” (John 17:17). Your usefulness depends on it, for the Scriptures say, “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God that you might know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). If you want to be sure of your faith; if you want to be an exclamation pointrather than a question mark, then you need to be certain that the Bible is the Word of God.

Discussion

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22:18-19).

God makes it very clear that we are to believe and revere our Bibles, but there is in our world a war over the Word; a battle over the Bible. There are those who despise it; they are against all that we Christians stand for. There are those who deny it; they simply refuse to believe the Bible is the Word of God. There are those who distort it; they twist the words of the Bible to their own destruction. There are those who dissect it, treating Scripture more like a math text than a love story. There are those who disregard it, claiming it unimportant and irrelevant. They want to focus on the here-and-now, so they spend their energies making this world abetter place from which to go to hell. There are those who claim to believe it, giving lip service to the Bible as God’s Word, but they do not know it, nor do they live by it. There is dust on their Bibles and drought in their hearts. Finally, there are those who believe it. They know the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, authentic Word of God, and they trust it for the daily guidance of their lives. We can have a firm assurance that the Bible is the Word of God. There is an abundance of evidence to support the fact.

Scientific Evidence

Skeptics seem to think that the Bible is full of scientific errors. However, before an individual can make that assertion, they had better make sure they know both science and Scripture. You see, I have heard unbelievers state that the Bible is not a book of science, but a book of religion, which is basically true. It is not written to teach us about science, but to teach us about God. But the God of salvation and the God of creation are the same. Science doesn’t take God by surprise. A close look at Scripture reveals that it is scientifically accurate.

Every now and then science may disagree with the Bible, but usually science just needs time to catch up. For example, in 1861 a French scientific academy printed a brochure offering 51 incontrovertible facts that proved the Bible in error. Today there is not a single reputable scientist who would support those supposed “facts,” because modern science has disproved them all!

The ancients believed the earth was held up by Atlas, or resting on pillars, or even seated on the backs of elephants. But today we know the earth is suspended in space, a fact the Word of God records in Job 26:7: “He . . . hangeth the earth upon nothing.” God revealed the facts of cosmology long before man had any idea of the truth.

For centuries man believed the earth was flat, but now we know the earth is a globe. The prophet Isaiah, writing 750 years before the birth of Christ, revealed that “God sitteth upon the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22). The word translated here as “circle” was more commonly translated “sphere.” In other words, Isaiah explained that the earth was a globe centuries before science discovered it.

When Ptolemy charted the heavens, he counted 1026 stars in the sky. But with the invention of the telescope man discovered millions and millions of stars, something that Jeremiah 33:22 revealed nearly three thousand years ago: “The host of heaven cannot be numbered.” How did these men of God know the truth of science long before the rest of the world discovered it? They were moved by the Holy Spirit to write the truth. God’s Word is not filled with errors. It is filled with facts, even scientific facts.

When the black plague was killing one quarter of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, it was the church, not science, that helped overcome the dread disease. The leaders in the church noticed the instructions given by the Lord to Moses in Leviticus 13:46: “All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.” These early believers did not know microbiology or understand what germs were, but they could understand a clear teaching to quarantine someone who was sick. So they followed the Biblical dictum, quarantined those sick with the plague, and stopped it from spreading. The Bible had its science correct even before man discovered the truth! Don’t accept the charge that the Bible is filled with scientific errors. Modern science seems determined to explain God away, and refuses to acknowledge any evidence of the supernatural. But the science of Scripture is one reason to accept the Bible as God’s Word.

Historical Evidence

The Bible is not primarily a history book, but it records history, and all the things we believe as Christians are historical fact. Historians have criticized the Bible as being filled with errors, but in our lifetime we have seen the history of the Scriptures proven right time after time. For example, linguists rejected the fact that Moses authored the Pentateuch, claiming that people didn’t know how to write during Moses’ day. But then the Tel Elarmona tablets were discovered in northern Egypt, containing business transactions of people in Palestine centuries before Moses was born. It turns out the Bible was correct–the people of Moses’ day did have a written language.

For years historians claimed Daniel’s story of King Belshazzar was a fake, that there was no record of that Babylonian king. They claimed the last Babylonian king was named Nabinitus, and that Belshazzar never existed. Then one day an archeologist uncovered a clay tablet describing the rule of Belshazzar, who was co-regent with his father, King Nabinitus. The Bible had been right all along.

Historians and archaeologists have dug into the history of both the Old and New Testaments, and each time the historical accuracy of Scripture has been upheld. That is one of the reasons we can trust the Bible.

Wonderful Unity

Another reason to trust the Scripture as the Word of God is that it offers a unique unity. Here is one unified book, yet it is really 66 books put together. Those books were written by at least forty different authors over a period of sixteen hundred years. They were written in thirteen countries, on three continents, by people of all different backgrounds. Some were shepherds, others were kings; some were soldiers, others were scholars; some were learned historians, others were unschooled fishermen. They wrote on different subjects, at different times, in at least three different languages. Yet on all subjects they came together to create one unified book that reveals the story of God and His people. From Genesis to Revelation, it reads as one book. What incredible unity! I’ve been studying this book for forty years, and the more I study the more unified I find it. There are no hidden flaws, only hidden beauties. The Bible has but one theme: salvation. It has one hero: Jesus. It has one villain: Satan. It has one purpose: to glorify God. How could this incredible book be written apart from divine intervention? There was clearly a Master Architect who designed this book, giving it a wonderful unity. That’s why I believe it.

Fulfilled Prophecy

Another reason we can believe the Bible is because of the fulfilled prophecies contained in it. It is the only book of its kind with so many accurate prophecies. For example, there are over 300 Old Testament prophecies dealing with Jesus Christ that are fulfilled in the New Testament. Statisticians tell us that to suggest they are merely fulfilled by chance is an impossibility. A skeptic might say that Jesus, as a student of the Old Testament, simply arranged to fulfill these prophecies. But how could He arrange to be born in Bethlehem, fulfilling the prophecy of Micah? How could He arrange to be born of a virgin? How could He arrange for the prophet Isaiah to write all kinds of intricate details of the Lord centuries before He was born? And could He have arranged for the psalmist to describe His death by crucifixion long before that style of punishment was first used? Could He have arranged for the Roman government to crucify Him upon a cross, or for Judas to betray Him for exactly thirty pieces of silver, as the Old Testament prophesied? Finally, could He have arranged His own resurrection from the dead three days after His burial?

Well, in a sense the Lord Jesus did arrange all of that. As God, He revealed it to the Old Testament authors, who wrote the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And so convinced were those who saw Jesus, that they were willing to lay down their lives for the truth. No one lays down their life for a lie. The early Christians knew that Jesus was who He claimed to be. There is no way to explain fulfilled prophecy apart from divine inspiration.

The Ever-Living Quality of Scripture

Another reason we can trust the Bible is that it is always alive. No book has endured as much opposition. Men have laughed at it, scorned it, burned it, and made laws against it. At times it has been illegal to even own a Bible. Men have preached its funeral. But the corpse has outlived its pallbearers. The Bible has survived. Despite all the attempts to bury the Bible, it has continued to endure. No other book can make that claim. The ancient religious manuscripts of the pagans have disappeared, but the Bible continues. The wisdom of great men is often forgotten by succeeding generations, but the wisdom of God remains intact and available. The Word of the Lord endureth forever. That unique quality makes me believe that this is a special book–God’s book–and He intends for man to have it.

The Life-Changing Quality of Scripture

The Bible is not like any other book. It is alive and powerful. It describes itself as a sword and as dynamite. It has power to change lives and power to save sinners. No other book, no other power can take men’s guilt away except the Bible. It sanctifies those who believe. It brings truth and maturity to the saints. You will never grow spiritually strong until you begin to feed on the milk of the Word. It offers sufficiency to the sufferer. Many times I have seen people hurting or in torment, and they have found comfort in the Bible which they could find nowhere else. It brings satisfaction to the scholar. You can study it for a lifetime and still not fathom its depths. It is a book so deep you can swim forever and never touch bottom, yet so peaceful that even a child can take a drink without fear of drowning. You can never move on in your faith until you come to see the Bible for what it is: God’s precious gift to us, given so that we may know Him and find eternal life in Him. You can be certain that the Bible is the Word of God.

About Dr. Adrian Rogers

Dr. Adrian Rogers was the Pastor Emeritus of Bellevue Baptist Church and one of America’s most respected Bible preachers. Under his pastoral leadership, Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, grew from 9,000 members in 1972 to more than 29,000. A staunch defender of Biblical inerrancy, Pastor Rogers was called upon to serve three times as President of the 14-million member Southern Baptist Convention. Adrian Rogers has written numerous books: Mastering Your Emotions; God’s Way to Health, Wealth and Wisdom; The Power of His Presence; and Ten Secrets for a Successful Family; Kingdom Authority, Believe in Miracles but Trust in Jesus; Standing for Light and Truth; God’s Wisdom is Better Than Gold; plus many others.

Dr. Rogers was also the pastor/teacher of Love Worth Finding, a ministry which extends the message of Dr. Rogers far beyond the congregation, proving to be a blessing to listeners around the nation every day. This radio and television ministry takes Dr. Rogers’ message in four languages to more than 14,000 television outlets and 1,100 radio outlets in the United States and in 150 other countries including all of Europe, Latin America, China, Australia, Africa, India, and beyond. Tapes and other resources from Dr. Rogers are available through Love Worth Finding Ministries, P.O. Box 38300, Memphis, TN 38183-0300, 1-800-274-LOVE (5683).

Interview with feminist artist Judy Chicago

“I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.”

JUDY CHICAGO SYNOPSIS

Judy Chicago was one of the pioneers of Feminist art in the 1970s, a movement that endeavored to reflect women’s lives, call attention to women’s roles as artists, and alter the conditions under which contemporary art was produced and received. In the process, Feminist art questioned the authority of the male-dominated Western canon and posed one of the most significant challenges to modernism, which was at the time wholly preoccupied with conditions of formalism as opposed to personal narrative and political activity. Seeking to redress women’s traditional underrepresentation in the visual arts, Chicago focused on female subject matter, most famously in her work The Dinner Party (1979), which celebrates the achievements of women throughout history, scandalizing audiences with her frank use of vaginal imagery. In her work, Chicago employed the “feminine” arts long relegated to the lowest rungs of the artistic hierarchy, such as needlework and embroidery. Chicago articulated her feminist vision not only as an artist, but also as an educator and organizer, most notably, in co-founding of the Feminist Art Program at Cal State Fresno as well as the installation and performance space, Womanhouse.

JUDY CHICAGO KEY IDEAS

Inspired by the women’s movement and rebelling against the male-dominated art scene of the 1960s, which lionized the Minimalist work of artists like Donald Judd, Chicago embraced explicitly female content. Creating works that recognized the achievements of major female historical figures or celebrated women’s unique experiences, Chicago produced a rich body of work that sought to add women to the historic record and, more generally, to enhance their representation in the visual arts.

Just as she elevated explicitly female subject matter, Chicago embraced artistic media whose creators were exclusively or mainly women and (perhaps not coincidentally) dismissed by the high art world as merely “craft.” Art forms such as needlework, ceramic decoration, and glass art are central to Chicago’s work, often included alongside traditional high art media, such as painting. Works such as The Dinner Party helped validate the importance of crafts-based art forms and break down the boundaries separating them from their “high” art counterparts.

Along with fellow artist Miriam Schapiro, Chicago co-founded several pioneering ventures that sought to change the structure of women’s artistic training, as well as broaden their access to, and visibility in, contemporary art. The women-only Feminist Art program, established at California Institute of Arts, centered on women’s identity, experiences, and collaborative, discussion-based practices such as consciousness-raising. Womanhouse, co-founded by Chicago and Schapiro as an outgrowth of the Feminist Art program, was an installation and performance space dedicated to female creative expression.

MOST IMPORTANT ART

Domes (1968)

Composed of three dome-like forms and using transparent material with spray-on plastic, this piece is rendered in the Minimalist style of Chicago’s early work. Its use of repeated shapes and glossy, “industrial” media suggest the work of artists such as Donald Judd, though there is significant contrast to the hard, geometric forms of Judd and his contemporaries in the deployment of softer, rounded forms that suggest a kind of ambiguous femininity. Critic Susan Jenkins suggests that the work prefigures the “purely feminist idiom” that was to come: the three domes make up what came to be Chicago’s signature stylistic motif, the triangle, closely associated with vaginal imagery in Chicago’s oeuvre.

JUDY CHICAGO BIOGRAPHY

Childhood

Judy Chicago was born Judy Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, in the last year of the Great Depression. She grew up in a liberal environment; unusual for the time, her intellectual Jewish parents both worked to support their children and openly articulated their left-wing politics. Chicago began drawing at the age of three and attending classes at the Institute of Chicago starting in 1947. In 1948, her father, Arthur Cohen, left his union job in the midst of the McCarthy blacklist and the controversy surrounding the family’s “Communist” leanings. Two years later, he died from a massive stomach ulcer.

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JUDY CHICAGO LEGACY

Judy Chicago’s work is significant for furthering the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and for the recognition and reinstatement of women’s roles throughout history, as well as for her dedication to the deconstruction of traditional hierarchies of fine art and craft, her zeal for the rediscovery of forgotten or undervalued technique, and for her vision of collaborative art-making. Her commitment to female subject matter provided a critical example followed by several generations of contemporary artists, such as video and performance artist Martha Rosler, while Chicago’s embrace of “female” art forms such as needlework and embroidery influenced many practitioners of textile art, including the contemporary textile artists Orly Kogan and Gillian Strong. Chicago’s legacy is also felt in her role as teacher, writer, and moving force behind such ventures as Womanhouse and Through the Flower, dedicated to using art to prevent the erasure of women’s achievements. Chicago has written eight major books documenting her and other female artists’ work, including Women and Art: Contested Territory.

JUDY CHICAGO QUOTES

“Women’s history and women’s art needs to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.”

“I could no longer pretend in my art that being a woman had no meaning.”

“There has to be more room for us as artists. We have to be able to be seen in our fullness in terms of our own artistic agency, and we’re a long way from that.”

“Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other’s shoulders and building upon each other’s hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.”

Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, July 20, 1939) is an American feminist artist, art educator,[3] and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces which examine the role of women in history and culture. Born in Chicago, Illinois, as Judith Cohen, she changed her name after the deaths of both her father and her first husband, choosing to disconnect from the idea of male dominated naming conventions. By the 1970s, Chicago had coined the term “feminist art” and had founded the first feminist art program in the United States. Chicago’s work incorporates stereotypical women’s artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with stereotypical male skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago’s most well known work is The Dinner Party, which resides in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen[1] in 1939, to Arthur and May Cohen, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father came from a twenty-three generation lineage of rabbis, including the Vilna Gaon. Unlike his family predecessors, Arthur became a labor organizer and a Marxist.[4] He worked nights at a post office and took care of Chicago during the day, while May, who was a former dancer, worked as a medical secretary.[1][4] Arthur’s active participation in the American Communist Party, liberal views towards women and support of worker’s rights strongly influenced Chicago’s ways of thinking and belief.[5] During McCarthyism era in the 1950s, Arthur was investigated, which made it difficult for him to find work and caused the family much turmoil.[4] In 1945, while Chicago was alone at home with her infant brother, Ben, an FBI agent visited their house. The agent began to ask the six-year-old Chicago questions about her father and his friends, but the agent was interrupted upon the return of May to the house.[5] Arthur’s health declined, and he died in 1953 from peritonitis. May would not discuss his death with her children and did not allow them to attend the funeral. Chicago did not come to terms with his death until she was an adult; in the early 1960s she was hospitalized for almost a month with a bleeding ulcer attributed to unresolved grief.[4]

May loved the arts, and instilled her passion for them in her children, as evident in Chicago’s future as an artist, and brother Ben’s eventual career as a potter. At age of three, Chicago began to draw and was sent to the Art Institute of Chicago to attend classes.[4][6]By the age of 5, Chicago knew that she “never wanted to do anything but make art”[6] and started attending classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.[7] She applied but was denied admission to the Art Institute,[5] and instead attended UCLA on a scholarship.[4]

While at UCLA she became politically active, designing posters for the UCLA chapter NAACP and eventually became its corresponding secretary.[5] In June 1959, she met and became romantically linked with Jerry Gerowitz. She left school and moved in with him, for the first time having her own studio space. The couple hitch hiked to New York in 1959, just as Chicago’s mother and brother moved to Los Angeles to be closer to her.[8] The couple lived in Greenwich Village for a time, before returning in 1960 from Los Angeles to Chicago so she could finish her degree. Chicago married Gerowitz in 1961.[9] She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962 and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Gerowitz died in a car crash in 1963, devastating Chicago and causing her to suffer from an identity crisis until later that decade. She received her Master of Fine Arts from UCLA in 1964.[4]

While in grad school, Chicago’s created a series that was abstract, yet easily recognized as male and female sexual organs. These early works were called Bigamy, and represented the death of her husband. One depicted an abstract penis which was “stopped in flight” before it could unite with a vaginal form. Her professors, who were mainly men, were dismayed over these works.[9] Despite the use of sexual organs in her work, Chicago refrained from using gender politics or identity as themes.

In 1965, Chicago displayed work in her first solo show, at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles; Chicago was one of only four female artists to take part in the show.[10] In 1968, Chicago was asked why she did not participate in the “California Women in the Arts” exhibition at the Lytton Center, to which she answered “I won’t show in any group defined as Woman, Jewish, or California. Someday when we all grow up there will be no labels.” Chicago began working in ice sculpture, which represented “a metaphor for the preciousness of life,” another reference towards her husband’s death.[11]

Study for Pasadena Lifesavers, prismacolor, 1968.

In 1969, the Pasadena Art Museum exhibited a series of Chicago’s spherical acrylic plastic dome sculptures and drawings in an “experimental” gallery. Art in America noted that Chicago’s work was at the forefront of the conceptual art movement, and the Los Angeles Times described the work as showing no signs of “theoretical New York type art.”[11] Chicago would describe her early artwork as minimalist and as her trying to be “one of the boys”.[12] Chicago would also experiment with performance art, using fireworks and pyrotechnics to create “atmospheres”, which involved flashes of colored smoke being manipulated outdoors. Through this work she attempted to “feminize” and “soften” the landscape.[13]

During this time, Chicago also began exploring her own sexuality in her work. She created the Pasadena Lifesavers, which was a series of abstract paintings that placed acrylic paint on Plexiglas. The works blended colors to create an illusion that the shapes “turn, dissolve, open, close, vibrate, gesture, wiggle,” representing her own discovery that “I was multi-orgasmic.” Chicago credited Pasadena Lifesavers, as being the major turning point in her work in relation to women’s sexuality and representation.[13]

As Chicago made a name for herself as an artist, and came to know herself as a woman, she no longer felt connected to her last name, Cohen. This was due to the late grief of the death of her father and the lost connection to her name through marriage, Judith Gerowitz, after her husband’s death. She decided she wanted to change her last name to something independent of being connected to a man by marriage or heritage.[4] During this time, she married sculptor Lloyd Hamrol, in 1965. (They divorced in 1979.)[14] Gallery owner Rolf Nelson nicknamed her “Judy Chicago”[4] because of her strong personality and thick Chicago accent. She decided this would be her new name, and sought to change it legally. Chicago was described as being “appalled” by the fact that she had to have her new husband’s signature on the paperwork to change her name legally.[14] To celebrate the name change, she posed for the exhibition invitation dressed like a boxer, wearing a sweatshirt with her new last name on it.[13] She also posted a banner across the gallery at her 1970 solo show at California State University at Fullerton, that read: “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and chooses her own name, Judy Chicago.”[14] An advertisement with the same statement was also placed in Artforum‘s October 1970 issue.[15]

In 1970, Chicago decided to teach full-time at Fresno State College, hoping to teach women the skills needed to express the female perspective in their work.[16] At Fresno, she planned a class that would consist only of women, and she decided to teach off campus to escape “the presence and hence, the expectations of men.”[17] She taught the first women’s art class in the fall of 1970 at Fresno State College. It became the Feminist Art Program, a full 15-unit program, in the Spring of 1971. This was the first feminist art program in the United States. Fifteen students studied under Chicago at Fresno State College: Dori Atlantis, Susan Boud, Gail Escola, Vanalyne Green, Suzanne Lacy, Cay Lang, Karen LeCocq, Jan Lester, Chris Rush, Judy Schaefer, Henrietta Sparkman, Faith Wilding, Shawnee Wollenman, Nancy Youdelman, and Cheryl Zurilgen. Together, as the Feminist Art Program, these women rented and refurbished an off-campus studio at 1275 Maple Avenue in downtown Fresno. Here they collaborated on art, held reading groups, and discussion groups about their life experiences which then influenced their art. Later, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro reestablished the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts. After Chicago left for Cal Arts, the class at Fresno State College was continued by Rita Yokoi from 1971 to 1973, and then by Joyce Aiken in 1973, until her retirement in 1992.[nb 1]

Chicago became a teacher at the California Institute for the Arts, and was a leader for their Feminist Art Program. In 1972, the program created Womanhouse, alongside Miriam Schapiro, which was the first art exhibition space to display a female point of view in art.[14] With Arlene Raven and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Chicago co-founded the Los Angeles Woman’s Building in 1973.[20] This housed the Feminist Studio Workshop, described by the founders as “an experimental program in female education in the arts. Our purpose is to develop a new concept of art, a new kind of artist and a new art community built from the lives, feelings, and needs of women.” [12][21] During this period, Chicago began creating spray-painted canvas, primarily abstract, with geometric forms on them. These works evolved, using the same medium, to become more centered around the meaning of the “feminine”. Chicago was strongly influenced by Gerda Lerner, whose writings convinced her that women who continued to be unaware and ignorant of women’s history would continue to struggle independently and collectively.[14]

Womanhouse was a project that involved Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. It began in the fall of 1971. They wanted to start the year with a large scale collaborative project that involved woman artists who spent much of their time talking about their problems as women. They used those problems as fuel and dealt with them while working on the project. Judy thought that female students often approach artmaking with an unwillingness to push their limits due to their lack of familiarity with tools and processes, and an inability to see themselves as working people. “The aim of the Feminist Art Program is to help women restructure their personalities to be more consistent with their desires to be artists and to help them build their artmaking out of their experiences as women.”[22]

In 1975, Chicago’s first book, Through the Flower, was published; it “chronicled her struggles to find her own identity as a woman artist.”[10]

Chicago decided to take Lerner’s lesson to heart and took action to teach women about their history. This action would become Chicago’s masterpiece, The Dinner Party, now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.[23] It took her five years and cost about $250,000 to complete.[7] First, Chicago conceived the project in her Santa Monica studio: a large triangle, which measures 48-feet by 43-feet by 36-feet, consisting of 39 place settings.[14] Each place setting commemorates a historical or mythical female figure, such as artists, goddesses, activists and martyrs. The project came into fruition with the assistance of over 400 people, mainly women, who volunteered to assist in needlework, creating sculptures and other aspects of the process.[24]

From 1980 until 1985, Chicago created The Birth Project. The piece used images of childbirth to celebrate woman’s role as mother. The installation reinterpreted the Genesis creation narrative, which focused on the idea that a male god created a male human, Adam, without the involvement of a woman.[24] Chicago described the piece as revealing a “primordial female self hidden among the recesses of my soul…the birthing woman is part of the dawn of creation.”[6] 150 needleworkers from the United States, Canada and New Zealand assisted in the project, working on 100 panels, by quilting, macrame, embroidery and other techniques. The size of the piece means it is rarely displayed in its entirety. The majority of the pieces from The Birth Project are held in the collection of the Albuquerque Museum.[24]

It is interesting to note that Chicago was not personally interested in motherhood. While she admired the women who chose this path, she did not find it right for herself. As recently as 2012, she has said “There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had.”[7]

After The Birth Project, Chicago returned to independent studio work. She created Powerplay, a series of drawings, weavings, paintings, cast paper and bronze reliefs. Through the series, Chicago replaced the male gaze with a feminist one, exploring the construct of masculinity and how power has affected men.[25]

In the mid-1980s Chicago’s interests “shifted beyond ‘issues of female identity’ to an exploration of masculine power and powerlessness in the context of the Holocaust.”[26] Chicago’s The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985–93)[26] is a collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, whom she married on New Year’s Eve 1985. Although Chicago’s previous husbands were both Jewish, it wasn’t until she met Woodman that she began to explore her own Jewish heritage. Chicago met poet Harvey Mudd, who had written an epic poem about the Holocaust. Chicago was interested in illustrating the poem, but decided to create her own work instead, using her own art, visual and written. Chicago worked alongside her husband to complete the piece, which took eight years to finish.[24] The piece, which documents victims of the Holocaust, was created during a time of personal loss in Chicago’s life: the death of her brother Ben, from Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the death of her mother from cancer.[27]

To seek inspiration for the project, Chicago and Woodman watched the documentary Shoah, which comprises interviews with Holocaust survivors at Nazi concentration camps and other relevant Holocaust sites.[27] They also explored photo archives and written pieces about the Holocaust.[28] They spent several months touring concentration camps and visited Israel.[26] Chicago brought other issues into the work, such as environmentalism, Native American genocide,[6] and the Vietnam War. With these subjects Chicago sought to relate contemporary issues to the moral dilemma behind the Holocaust.[27] This aspect of the work caused controversy within the Jewish community, due to the comparison of the Holocaust to these other historical and contemporary concerns.[6]The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light consists of sixteen large scale works made of a variety of mediums including: tapestry, stained glass, metal work, wood work, photography, painting, and the sewing of Audrey Cowan. The exhibit ends with a piece that displays a Jewish couple at Sabbath. The piece comprises 3000 square feet, providing a full exhibition experience for the viewer.[27]The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light was exhibited for the first time in October 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago.[27] Most of the work from the piece is held at the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[2]

Over the next six years, Chicago created works that explored the experiences of concentration camp victims.[26] Galit Mana of Jewish Renaissance magazine notes, “This shift in focus led Chicago to work on other projects with an emphasis on Jewish tradition”, including Voices from the Song of Songs (1997), where Chicago “introduces feminism and female sexuality into her representation of strong biblical female characters.”[26]

Chicago had two solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom in 2012, one in London and another in Liverpool.[26] The Liverpool exhibition included the launch of Chicago’s book about Virginia Woolf. Once a peripheral part of her artistic expression, Chicago now considers writing to be well integrated into her career.[26]

Chicago strives to push herself, exploring new directions for her art; she even attended car-body school to learn to air-brush and has recently begun to work in glass.[7] Taking such risks is easier to do when one lives by Chicago’s philosophy: “I’m not career driven. Damien Hirst’s dots sold, so he made thousands of dots. I would, like, never do that! It wouldn’t even occur to me.”[7] Chicago’s subject matter, however, has broadened from the focus of The Dinner Party. In the words of the artist: “I guess you could say that my eyes were lifted from my vagina.”[7]

Chicago trained herself in “macho arts,” taking classes in auto body work, boat building, and pyrotechnics. Through auto body work she learned spray painting techniques and the skill to fuse color and surface to any type of media, which would become a signature of her later work. The skills learned through boat building would be used in her sculpture work, and pyrotechnics would be used to create fireworks for performance pieces. These skills allowed Chicago to bring fiberglass and metal into her sculpture, and eventually she would become an apprentice under Mim Silinsky to learn the art of porcelain painting, which would be used to create works in The Dinner Party. Chicago also added the skill of stained glass to her artistic tool belt, which she used for The Holocaust Project.[14]Photography became more present in Chicago’s work as her relationship with photographer Donald Woodman developed.[28] Since 2003, Chicago has been working with glass.[33]

Collaboration is a major aspect of Chicago’s installation works. The Dinner Party, The Birth Project and The Holocaust Project were all completed as a collaborative process with Chicago and hundreds of volunteer participants. Volunteer artisans skills vary, often connected to “stereotypical” women’s arts such as textile arts.[14][27] Chicago makes a point to acknowledge her assistants as collaborators, a task at which other artists have notably failed.[7][35]

In 1978, Chicago founded Through the Flower, a non-profit feminist art organization. The organization seeks to educate the public about the importance of art and how it can be used as a tool to emphasize women’s achievements. Through the Flower also serves as the maintainer of Chicago’s works, having handled the storage of The Dinner Party, before it found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum. The organization also maintained The Dinner Party Curriculum, which serves as a “living curriculum” for education about feminist art ideas and pedagogy. The online aspect of the curriculum was donated to Penn State University in 2011.[33]

Chicago developed an art education methodology in which “female-centered content,” such as menstruation and giving birth, is encouraged by the teacher as “personal is political” content for art.[36] Chicago advocates the teacher as facilitator by actively listening to students in order to guide content searches and the translation of content into art. She refers to her teaching methodology as “participatory art pedagogy.”[37]

The art created in the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse introduced perspectives and content about women’s lives that had been taboo topics in society, including the art world.[38][39] In 1970 Chicago developed the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno, and has implemented other teaching projects that conclude with an art exhibition by students such as Womanhouse with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts, and SINsation in 1999 at Indiana University, From Theory to Practice: A Journey of Discovery at Duke University in 2000, At Home: A Kentucky Project with Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman at Western Kentucky University in 2002, Envisioning the Future at California Polytechnic State University and Pomona Arts Colony in 2004, and Evoke/Invoke/Provoke at Vanderbilt University in 2005.[40] Several students involved in Judy Chicago’s teaching projects established successful careers as artists, including Suzanne Lacy, Faith Wilding, and Nancy Youdelman.

Jump up^Aiken opened the all-women’s co-opGallery 25 with her students, developed the Fresno Art Museum’s Council of 100 and the Distinguished Women Artist Series, which helped develop programming and exhibitions about women at the museum.[18]

Jump up^Keifer-Boyd, K. (2007). From content to form: Judy Chicago’s pedagogy with reflections by Judy Chicago. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, 48(2), 133-153.

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